An Eclectic Journal of Opinion, History, Poetry and General Bloviating

Thursday, May 30, 2013

Memorial Day 1937—A Walk in the Sunshine Turns Deadly

It
was a hot, muggy day.But the sun was
shining brilliantly.Due to the week old
strike and the Memorial Day holiday, the giant mills nearby were not belching
their customary heavy smoke. Maybe those unaccustomed dazzling skies
contributed to the air of a holiday outing as steel workers, their wives in their finest summer dresses, and their
children converged by bus, trolley, auto, foot on Sam’s Place, an erstwhile dime-a-dancehall, turned into a makeshift soup kitchen and strike headquarters on Chicago’s
Southeast Side less than a mile from the Republic Steel mill.

It
was May 30, 1937.The Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC), the pet project of John L. Lewis’s Congress of Industrial
Organizations (CIO), had shocked
the nation earlier in the year by bringing industry behemoth U.S. Steel under contract by
infiltrating the company unions and
having them vote to affiliate.Face with
rising demand as there seemed to be a recovery under way from the depths of the
Depression on one hand and a
popular, labor friendly administration in Washington
on the other, the nation’s dominant steel company quietly surrendered.

Buoyed
by the success, organizers turned their attention to Little Steel, the smaller, independent operators in Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Chicago and other grimy industrial cities.But the bosses of Youngstown Sheet and Steel, Republic, Bethlehem, Jones and Laughlin and
others were a tougher bunch than the Wall
Street stock manipulators that ran the huge rump of the old Steel Trust.In fact they had nothing but contempt for the
monopolists, their old business enemies,
and their “weakling” attitude toward unionization.Little Steel vowed to fight.Tom
Girdler, President of Republic, had said that he would go back to hoeing
potatoes before he met the strikers’ demands.

The
ferocity of the opposition to unionization was not just empty rhetoric
either.They had shown they meant business
in blood on more than one occasion.Famously
in Youngstown, Ohio backin 1916 strikers accompanied by their
wives and children marched from the slums to the gates of the Sheet and Tube mill to keep strike
breakers from reporting to work.Inside
the gates a small army of private security forces responded by throwing dozens
of tear gas bombs.As the thick,
poisonous haze hung over the workers obscuring their vision, guard unleashed
volley after volley of rifle fire directly into their ranks.The exact toll may never be known as workers
were afraid to bring the wounded to medical attention.At least three were killed, probably twice
that many including women.Twenty-seven
injuries were confirmed, but strikes made oral reports of more than a
hundred.Enraged as the dead and wounded
lay bleeding on the ground the strikers attacked the guards with stones and
bricks and perhaps a pistol shot or two before retreating to town.

In
rioting over the next two days, workers burned much of the town’s business district
only to be eventually crushed by Ohio National
Guard troops.The memory of those
events was still fresh to workers more than twenty years later.Especially when Little Steel bosses quietly
let it be known that they had been stockpiling armories for years and were
ready, even eager to repeat the carnage.

The
USWOC had called their national strike against Little Steel a week
earlier.In Chicago it had been marred
by predictable violence, particularly on the part of the Chicago Police Department which had a long history of being used as
armed strike breakers.Beatings and
arrests on the picket lines were occurring daily.Some strike leaders had been kidnapped and
held incommunicado.For their part
senior police officers were “subsidized” by corporate bosses who also bought
political clout with the usual campaign contributions and bribes to local officials.They also pledged to reimburse the city for
police over time during the strike.In
addition the still largely Irish
Catholic force was kept inflamed by homilies preached in their parishes
deriding USWOC as “Godless Communists.”

Despite
this, moral among the strikers was high.After only a week out, families had not yet felt the full pinch of lost
incomes and strike soup kitchens kept them fed.Organizers made a point of engaging workers’
wives from the beginning, including them in planning and giving them important
support roles.This was critical because
many a strike had been lost in the past when families went hungry and the women
urged their men to return to work.

As
the large crowd gathered at Sam’s Place for the first mass meeting of the
strike, vendors plied the crowd with ice cream, lemonade, and soft drinks.Meals were passed out from the soup kitchen.Other families munched on sandwiches wrapped
in wax paper brought from home.Many of
the men passed friendly bottles as they settled into a round singing—mostly old
Wobbly songs including Solidarity
Foreverand Alfred Hayes’s I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night.

Then
came the rousing speeches.Joe Webber, USWOC’s main organizer
pointed his finger at the distant plant. The plan was to establish the first
mass picket at the gates of the Republic Works.Some workers carried homemade signs.Organizers passed out hundreds of pre-printed placards stapled to
lathing emblazoned with slogans.

With
a sense of a gay holiday parade the strikers marched away from Sam’s Place
behind two American flags singing as the went one block up the black top and
then turned into the wide, flat prairie that separated them from the distant
plant.

Historian/novelist
Howard Fast later described the
scene.

…snake-like, the
line of pickets crossed the meadowland, singing at first...but then the song
died as the sun-drenched plain turned ominous, as five hundred blue-coated
policemen took up stations between the strikers and the plant. The strikers’
march slowed—but they came on. The police ranks closed and tightened… now it
was to unarmed men and women and children that a police captain said, “You
dirty sons of bitches, this is as far as you go!”

About two
hundred and fifty yards from the plant, the police closed in on the strikers. Billies and clubs were out already, prodding,
striking, nightsticks edging into women's breasts and groins. It was great fun
for the cops who were also somewhat afraid, and they began to jerk guns out of
holsters.

The cops said, “You
got no rights. You Red bastards, you got no rights.”

Even if a modern
man's a steelworker, with muscles as close to iron bands as human flesh gets, a
pistol equalizes him with a weakling--and more than equalizes. Grenades began
to sail now; tear gas settled like an ugly cloud. Children suddenly cried with panic,
and the whole picket line gave back, men stumbling, cursing, gasping for
breath. Here and there, a cop tore out his pistol and began to fire; it was
pop, pop, pop at first, like toy favors at some horrible party, and then, as
the strikers broke under the gunfire and began to run, the contagion of killing
ran like fire through the police.

They began to
shoot in volleys. It was wonderful sport, because these pickets were unarmed
men and women and children; they could not strike back or fight back. The cops
squealed with excitement. They ran after fleeing men and women, pressed
revolvers to their backs, shot them down and then continued to shoot as the
victims lay on their faces, retching blood. When a woman tripped and fell, four
cops gathered above her, smashing in her flesh and bones and face. Oh, it was
great sport, wonderful sport for gentle, pot-bellied police, who mostly had to
confine their pleasures to beating up prostitutes and street peddlers—at a time
when Chicago was world-infamous as a center of gangsterism, assorted crime and
murder.

And so it went,
on and on, until ten were dead or dying and over a hundred wounded. And the
field a bloodstained field of battle. World War veterans there said that never
in France had they seen anything as brutal as this.

Because
workers were afraid to bring their injured to hospital, the exact casualty
count may never be known for sure.Ten
men were confirmed dead.All shot in the
back. More than 50 gunshot wounds were reported. At least a hundred were badly
injured, many more with scrapes, bruises, and turned ankles from police clubs
and the panicked stampede to escape.

Many
reporter and photographers were on the scene.Police confiscated most of their film.Newsreel cameras caught the action, but the companies were pressured not
to show the footage.The next day, led
by the rabidly anti-union Chicago Tribune, most of the press
dutifully recorded that the police had come under attack by fanatic Reds and had acted in
self-defense.

Although
covered in the labor press, the nation as a whole was kept in the dark about
what had happened.Even the workers
supposed friend Franklin D. Roosevelt,
pretty much accepted the official account and told reporters that “the majority
of people are saying just one thing, ‘A plague on both your houses.’”

A Cook County Coroner’s Jury ruled the
deaths that day as “justifiable homicide.”Not only was no action taken against any of the police involved that
day, but senior officers were commended and promoted.

The
truth about what happened was very nearly suppressed, as so many atrocities
committed against working people had been.But a single newsreel cameraman saved the footage he shot from the roof
of his car.Some of the photographers on
the scene retained their shots.The
stills and the moving pictures were placed on exhibit during the hearing on
Republic Steel held by the subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor almost a year later.A shocked nation saw for itself the
senseless, unprovoked brutality of the police.

As
for the strike, it dragged on through the summer, as did regular violence on
picket lines.Then on July 19th it was Ladies Day on the picket line in front
of the Republic Steel mill in Youngstown.After a company guard assaulted one of the women, they were pelted with
rocks and bottles.Retreating into the
plant, in an eerie replay of the 1916 violence, guards let loose with tear gas
and then opened fire, many firing down on the crowd from virtual snipers’
nests.At least two were killed and
dozens wounded.Once again the National
Guard was called in and the town became a virtual occupied territory.The strike was crushed and workers went back.

But
the Steel Workers turned to the new National
Labor Relations Board for help.They
complained of unfair labor practices by the Little Steel companies.The case took years to resolve.But in 1942, with another war on and the need
for industrial peace, the NLRB ordered the companies to recognize what had
become the United Steel Workers Union.

Today
a local union hall stands on the site of Sam’s Place.The Republic Mill and other Little Steel
plants are closed and pad-locked eyesores.The city seeks desperately to find some way to redevelop what are now
called simply Brown Fields.Recently the site was suggested as one
possible future home for Barack Obama’s
Presidential Library.USW members
and the Illinois Labor History Society
sometimes gather in remembrance of that terrible day.And the last aging survivors, including some
of the children present, fade away one by one, their stories untold.